Thursday, March 24, 2011

Michele Glazer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, will be Whitworth's endowed reader for the 3rd annual Nadine Chapman Endowed Reading, named in honor of the late associate professor of English at Whitworth. Glazer will read from her works on Friday, April 8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Robinson Teaching Theatre in Weyerhaeuser Hall at Whitworth University. A book sale and reception will follow the reading. Admission is free. For more information, please call (509) 777-3253.
Whitworth invites regional authors to campus each year to read their poetry, prose or creative nonfiction in memory of Chapman, who died in July 2008 after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer.

Glazer is an associate professor of English and the director of creative writing at Portland State University. She is the author of a number of poetry collections, including On Tact & the Made up World (Iowa, 2010); Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa, 2004), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We'd Come to See (Pittsburgh, 1997).

Glazer's poems address questions of being and value; they explore the borders between self and other, old and young, sick and healthy, and stranger and intimate. Glazer's methods of examination and meditation draw her to physical states and their processes, to the linguistic and formal relationships between poetic line and phrase, speech and interruption, and prose sentence and poetic line. Her poems draw the reader to missteps in perception and language, those fractures that often crack open to yield profound meaning.

Thomas Gardner, author of A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson, says,
"[Glazer's] poems seem balanced on the edge of an enormity, desperate to be changed or 'stained' by what's unseen. Continually changing scale, stuttering and beginning again at the border where perspective suddenly turns 'abstract,' [her] poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop's in their dramatization of the human cost of our need to map and know and understand."

The Nadine Chapman Memorial Fund was established to honor, through the annual endowed reading, Chapman's profound contributions to the Whitworth community. In her 12 years at Whitworth, Chapman inspired hundreds of students through her devoted teaching, her sensitivity, and her deep friendships. Many of her students have gone on to graduate programs in literature and creative writing and have become professional writers. Her students recall her graciousness and her dedication to the craft of writing, and the university hopes that the endowed reading will inspire those who may not have known her to discover and share the joy she found in creative writing.

Located in Spokane, Wash., Whitworth is a private liberal arts university affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The university, which has an enrollment of nearly 3,000 students, offers 60 undergraduate and graduate degree programs.